February 2005 Archive
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February 2005 Posts
Verizon is has wired parts of Falls Church with fiber for their new Fios service. The idea that is, instead of using your ancient telephone wires or mediocre cable lines for internet, Verizon has been laying fiber optic cables in neighborhoods around the US.
Fiber was once reserved for corporations with huge bandwidth needs, it's amazing for a geek like me to see this come all the way to our house. The best part is that they are charging about the same as cable modem and dsl for a far faster connection.
DSL: $49.95/month -- 1.5 Mbs download, 256 Kbs up
Cable: $55/month -- 5 Mbs download, 128 Kbs up
Fios: $49.95 month -- 15 Mbs download, 2 Mbs up
Which one would you choose?
But there are two problems...
1) You have to go through Verizon... ugh... I hate dealing with them. It took them almost a year to cancel a phone line that never existed (two entires on my bill with the same phone number).
2) You have to have a Verizon phone number.*see note
*Note: You don't need the phone number to use the service, but you need it to find out if you can get the service. You see, they look up your phone number to see if your neighborhood has been wired. I have Voip, so without a Verizon number, they weren't able to tell me if I could get the service. Telling them my address, zip code, or latitude and longitudinal coordinates were no help. Typical Verizon!
If you want to find out if you can get fiber to your house and you have a normal phone line, try this site:
Good luck, and if you have made the switch, please let me know how it has worked out for you.
When I was a kid I used to love to stack blocks as high as possible. Heck, I still like to stack blocks as high as possible, and the more precarious the better.
Four Juniors at DigiPen Institute of Technology, a university a few blocks from Microsoft's and Nintendo America's headquarters that specializes in the fine art of video games, took the block stacking concept and turned it into an awesome multiplayer game called Bontgo.
You probably need a good computer for this game, as it looks great, and the physics engine is superb. I've only played against the computer, but when I go home this weekend I plan on challenging my brothers and sister to a block-stacking duel.
Bontgo is a free download.